Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (24 page)

And they’re all together
in LA at this point?

“They’re all together; they
do some separate overdubs, but they did track it pretty much; kind of a dream
band to me. Because I had used all those guys in different sessions. But to
have them all together, they were available right after Christmas. And we got
Richard Page. There’s even another singer that sang with Coverdale, Tommy
Funderburk. Because they all wanted to sing with or work with David Coverdale
too. We go in, and within a week, it’s recorded, Coverdale sings an incredible
vocal, which was the hold-up with the whole album, which is what almost cost me
my career. They finish the track and I play it for people at Geffen and like
people are just stunned, at what it sounds like. So they say, well, the
record’s already in production, and we’re already two years late, so what will
we do with it? So anyway, that’s a whole other marketing discussion. It came
out as a single, but the single was not on the album. The single was a single,
which sold a fuck load, obviously, because it was that version, and then
I put it on the Whitesnake’s
Greatest Hits
.”

“When we started planning the
album, the people at our record label said that it would be crazy for us not to
update those two songs,” Coverdale had told
Hit Parader
, back on the
press trail at the time. “Whitesnake has had a long and quite successful career
outside America, and none of us saw any reason not to draw on that success this
time around. The plan from the beginning was to let people know what kind of
music this band can make through the release of ‘Still Of The Night.’ Then,
once everyone knew that we’re a hard rocking band, we can come back with ‘Here
I Go Again,’ which is a little more of a pop/rock song. I think that’s a very
healthy approach because it also shows some of our diversity.”

The video for the song was pretty much
just like the other ones, namely a mix of David and Tawny and the
mystery band looking impossibly the product of all things 1980s. One
distinguishing feature was that Tawny was seen doing an improvised combination
of dance, gymnastics and stripper moves on top of two Jaguars, the
black one being Callner’s, the white one being David’s. The flaunting of wealth
in the videos, says Tawny, mirrored perfectly her lifestyle with David as the
record started taking off, including private jets, penthouse suites, the
best of everything.

Prima donna
behaviour real and imagined, it was threatening to bring the
hammer down on the whole escapade. But keeping the illusion alive was the
tiny asterisk that the band already had under their belt a gold record with
Slide
It In
.

“Yeah, they had a gold record, and he
knew that,” says Kalodner, the “he” in the equation being bigshot David Geffen.
“Yeah, they had a gold record. And you know, Rupert Perry, once the
record went gold here, he switched to the American mix for worldwide as well.
And then Clive Calder was even madder at me. But you know, compared with the
stress of no product… Also EMI was pressuring me, and Sony Japan. David Geffen,
before and after that, only encouraged everything I did. This is the
only time I think he ever criticized what I was doing.”

“A lot of these things, until you ask me,
I’ve forgotten. Because, for real, I have nightmares about all this stuff. I
mean, I had to go to a psychologist today in order that I could do this
interview. Do you know David Coverdale? I mean he is a huge awesome presence.
And then you have to realize, that I’m working for the smartest, most powerful
guy in the world in the record business, David Geffen. So, he’s not very happy
with me that I’m taking all this time with some artist he barely gives a shit
about.”

It’s not his style of music, I offer, as
partial justification. “He’s not a metal guy. He said that’s your thing, and
Tom Zutaut’s thing when he signed Guns N’ Roses. So he just stayed out of it,
and Eddie Rosenblatt usually had to deliver the news to me, like what the
hell is taking so long? This is the time, you know, right at the
end of this, I had started struggling. I finally told Aerosmith, either
they were gonna use Bruce Fairbairn... and Tim Collins at the
time was cleaning them up in the fall of 1986, off of drugs. So anyway there
was a lot going on in my life. And David Coverdale had no money, you know, and there’s
a lot of insanity surrounding him. Tawny Kitaen, who was O.J. Simpson’s
girlfriend... believe me, there was enough drama for like ten books.”

Back to the
Whitesnake
track
list, “Give Me All Your Love” was the first selection thus far on the
record to hit that middle sweet spot, the band turning in a sort of stadium
rock shuffle o’er which is strung a hair metal melody. Then we’re into the
band’s shockingly cliché hair metal ballad, which simply added to a record
chock full of firepower of a more creative sort, even if two of the
compositions were re-tries. “Is This Love” had been originally written for Tina
Turner, and the deflating thing is, it’s a song that could have made as much
sense on a Tina Turner record as it did here, or with Heart or Cheap Trick or
with Aerosmith. Sure, it’s a Coverdale/Sykes composition, but it could just as
easily have come from the pens of a Diane Warren or a Jim Vallance.

The track’s video, plus the aforementioned others from the record, become some of the most iconic rock videos of this
plush and pricey era. “You mean the MTV years? That’s one of the
perceptions, that it was so vast,” muses Coverdale. “My ex-wife was the
video vamp and all over the world I would see women in the audience with her
hair and hair colour. She was responsible for more hair styles than Jennifer
Aniston ever was. It was breathtaking. She could have made a fortune being a
model for hair products. But it was so vast, so big and so successful — it
still resonates and I still make a very good living from that period of time.
But that’s one of the problems; that is the image that is still perceived by
Clear Channel and bigger promoters. I got to a period in the early ‘80s where I
knew it was time to take Whitesnake to the next level which was going to be
more the style that Hendrix created for the blues. He made the
blues more electrifying. My colleagues at that time weren’t of the
same vision which is why I moved on to players like John Sykes, who could
assist me in going to that next level.”

Told that the song remains huge in Quebec
to this day, Coverdale says, “I’m familiar with that song always doing very
well, but I swear to God when I came with the Scorpions to play Toronto,
Montreal and Quebec... I swear the response to that song was as if Zeppelin had
just gone on and played ‘Stairway To Heaven.’ It was immense to the
point where I’m standing there enjoying it, thinking, keep it coming. The
response at the end of the song was breathtaking. It was like everyone in that
arena had been married or met to that fucking song. It had some immense
connection there and I couldn’t define it. It always does well — don’t
misunderstand me, but this was beyond.”

“I had to have four tracks that could be
played on radio,” says Kalodner, asked about this cookie-cutter ballad from the
hair farm. “And it was the artist’s record, so the rest of the
record was whatever, within reason, they wanted. So obviously I made sure they
were recorded and played right. I only concentrated on four, at the
most, five songs. ‘Is This Love’ is one of the songs I insisted on and spent a
lot of time on. That’s why, maybe you can understand, you can only do that with
so many songs. You can only have them fix the guitars, fix the
background vocals, have him sing it. You know, he’s such a great singer, he can
sing different ways. You can only harp on these people so many times. There’s
two albums I really learned that with, the
Whitesnake
record, the
‘87 record, and
Permanent Vacation
. And then I really honed it down,
with Aerosmith, when they did
Get A Grip
. I got five commercial songs
out of them, and that record was one of the biggest selling rock records ever.”

“Children Of The Night” was an additional
chunk of gleaming hair metal, although in Whitesnake’s world, at least
sonically, their approach was not nearly as thin and high as was the
norm from any of the native Californians. This was a thumping hockey barn metal
that positioned the band worlds away from Hollyrock as well as their
own academic blues rock past.

“Straight For The Heart” picked up the
pace, the band going full-on melodic, keyboards prominent, for a brisk pop
metal rocker that served as the record’s “Guilty Of Love.” The keyboard pattern
was a travesty and light years beyond what Jon Lord would have done in this
situation.

Whitesnake
closes with more of the same arch-‘80s keyboard washes as power ballad “Don’t
Turn Away” comes to life,  if living a life as a song that could have been
popped onto any Bon Jovi record is any sort of life at all!

The European version of the
record featured two additional tracks of little consequence. Still, “Looking
For Love,” over-worked ballad that it is, nonetheless pulsates with some of the
blues that distinguished Whitesnake in the first place, through the
chord changes and Coverdale’s Paul Rodgers vocal contemplations. Its break
drives the point home further, David playing the spurned and lonely with the
aplomb he’d practiced many times since going solo. “You’re Gonna Break My Heart
Again” is a pounding hair metal rocker with more pop than blues, its chording
down the lines of a Dokken or even Kiss at their creative low point in the
late 1980s. Still, the writing is immersed, drowned and coated in the
singular production crucible in which the rest of this gauzy record is built,
making the track a song that indeed sounds finished to the album’s insane
standards, Coverdale singing like a star, John Sykes loading up like an
offensive line in a crucial playoff short yardage situation.

“I stayed awake at night dreaming of a
chance to get on stage in America again,” reflected Coverdale to writer Rick
Evans, emphasizing the significance of the band’s Atlantic crossing that had
put them in Los Angeles on the verge of rock immortality. “Considering how long
Whitesnake has been around, we really haven’t spent much time in the
US. But all that will soon change. America is the biggest and most lucrative
rock market in the world, and on top of that, the fans are the
most knowledgeable. They know what great rock ‘n’ roll is all about. That’s why
I’m so convinced they’ll instantly fall in love with Whitesnake.”

While the smoke was clearing — and out of
it emerged a Frankenstein of a record — it was the videos, as discussed, that
shone a light on who was going to be touring the record.

Says Murray, “At that point you’ve got a
band for the video, and it’s like, okay, let’s keep this band. Amusingly,
eighteen months before, because Tommy Aldridge was John Sykes’ favourite
drummer, he was desperate to get Tommy into Whitesnake when we were looking for
a drummer.  I suggested Tommy before Ian Paice joined Whitesnake in ‘79. ‘Who?
Never heard of him.’ So this time around, obviously David did know who he was,
but he wasn’t going to submit to doing what John wanted him to do, so he almost
gave him the brush-off. And it was quite amusing that once John’s out of the
picture, then Tommy gets the call. Now it’s on David’s terms, as it were. So
we, in ‘84, we’d done pretty well on a tour supporting Quiet Riot. And Rudy
Sarzo was their bass player, and very visual and very good-looking guy, so he
was a very obvious person to get on bass.”

Backing up a bit, Murray sows the
seed of his own removal from the band, ceding way for one Rudy Sarzo. “Fall of
‘84, we did about six weeks through the West Coast, Canada, and then
the audiences were really dropping off, so we left the tour before it got to the
East Coast. In the summer we’d done some shows with Dio. Not a proper tour.
Just to get ourselves seen, really. And in the middle of that, we’d gone to
Japan and played enormous stadium gigs with the Scorpions and Michael Schenker
and people like that, with Bon Jovi opening. So the Quiet Riot tour really
helped us, but it also did introduce David to Rudy Sarzo and the bass player
was an easy person to replace. Image-wise he certainly wanted everything to be
very LA by that point, in early ‘87. So that was that, for me, really.”